showering stars of yellow, red, and green that are falling about him from, so to speak, exploding bombs of eulogy. Nor as to an idol or a marvel let us draw near, but as to a fellow mortal, genuinely true to the real in every, and the best, sense of the word; one who, though famous, was not honeycombed with ambition or tainted with cunning or cant; and though a soldier and wearing a soldier's laurels, yet never craved or sought honors except as they bloomed on deeds done for the glory of his lawfully constituted and acknowledged civil authority; in short, a soldier to whom the sense of duty was a gospel, and a man of the world whose only rule of life was, that life should be upright and stainless. I cannot but think that Providence meant, through him, to prolong the ideal of the gentleman in this world.

And now to those high moral standards, warmest family affections, imperial qualities, — Lee had a bearing that would have made him at home among princes, add wealth, station, an imposing stature, a noble countenance, and abilities of the first order, and, as the background of those preeminent attributes, a glowing series of rare victories in the cause of the Confederacy with its appealingly tragic life and death, and it is easy to see why, through the natural impulses of our nature, Lee has become the embodiment of one of the world's ideals, that of the soldier, the Christian, and the gentleman. And

from the bottom of my heart I thank Heaven, since the commercial spirit of our time has grown into a sordid, money-gorged, godless, snoring monster, for the comfort of having a character like Lee's to look at, standing in burnished glory above the smoke of Mammon's altars.

But we are not seeking the sublimation of his mortalness; rather we would see the ingrained qualities of his nature which carried this modern Prometheus, those last two days of the Confederacy, on to the storm-battered crags of Scythia.

In manner and mood becoming his native gentleness of character and unsullied life, and above all, the tender associations of the morning (it was Palm Sunday and the church-bells of the land were calling from steeple to steeple), let us look at him as a fellow mortal, look at him and find, if we can, the reason why, as he sits there by that Virginia roadside amid the wreck of the Army of Northern Virginia, nothing Longstreet does or may say as to Grant's magnanimity of character assuages his troubled mind. With this end in view then, and in order that our survey may be direct, true and substantial, let us detach him from his surroundings, penetrate the glamour and deal with his personality, that marvellous compound the secrets of whose making are in the breast of Nature herself, and which she in her wisdom turns over from the cradle into the unfeeling hands of Destiny to direct to its end.

So, note, if you will, the stately angle at which he holds his head, and the peremptory silencing gaze of those potent eyes, studded with the light of conscious personal worth and a distinguished ancestry; eyes which, as those of all men of like parts, aloofness and dignity, are ever quietly on their guard. And do not fail to note, also, how quickly his winning openness of address shelves into an unfathomable ocean of reserve; the open gate, the blooming meadow, figuratively, closing, like a floe in a polar sea. This cold simile is not overdrawn: he greeted his fellow men with charming, dignified kindliness, but that was the end of it, and there is no one among the living or dead, outside of his own family, who has ever claimed to have been on close confidential relations with him.

Under the habitually unruffled composure of that ocean of reserve, and dominated, as I believe, by two master spirits, stands the authentic Lee. And who were those master spirits, which, blind to facts and deaf to reason, drove him on from Farmville? Were they creations of his own? No, not at all. Nature herself had planted them. And what were they? One, an all-pervading unconscious pride, a pride not sordid or arrogant, but lofty. The other, sovereignly cogent and diffused through his whole being and pulsing in every vein, namely, a burning, even fierce enthusiasm. These, in my judgment, were the ingrained, controlling temper

amental qualities in Robert E. Lee. The former could not stand the hoar frost of defeat in a cause he believed right; the latter converted him at danger's first challenge, as was again and again displayed in the field, into a prompt and inveterate fighter. As for instance, at Antietam, although he had met and stood off McClellan, yet with such carnage that it was in effect a defeat, still for a day after the battle he held his ground among his dead, silently, yet resolutely, proclaiming to his adversary to come on if he dared. So, too, he stood for a day at Gettysburg, after his frightful repulses, inviting Meade to attack; and when with his bleeding army he reached the flooded Potomac after Gettysburg to find every bridge swept away, undismayed he turned his back on the raging stream and, planting his colors, defiantly bade the Army of the Potomac to strike. Who can forget, either, how quickly he accepted Hooker's gage of battle in the Wilderness, and how a year later (the violets were just in bloom again for the first time in the blood-stained woods) he plunged at Grant. No, no eagle that ever flew, no tiger that ever sprang, had more natural courage; and I will guarantee that every field he was on, if ask them about him, will speak of the unquailing battle-spirit of his mien. Be not deceived: Lee, notwithstanding his poise, was naturally the most belligerent bull-dog man at the head of any army in the war.

you

XV

AND now, as there by the roadside he sits, his nature distempered by the balk of its two masterful, earthy, incarnated spirits, we discover the reason why nothing Longstreet can say assuages his troubled mind; and why the idea of surrender is so galling.

Not then, and peradventure never, did it dawn on Lee that it was not Grant primarily, but a country with a destiny against which he had drawn his sword, that had cast him down. And mistake not, by the significance of this fact Lee mounts the dire, footworn steps of Tragedy, one of the worthiest characters that ever passed through its dread portal.

Fate! you never drew a harder lot than that you drew for Robert E. Lee. For he did not believe in Slavery at all; in fact, to him it was repulsive, and an institution antagonistic to the South's ultimate political weal; yet you put him at its head in its last struggle with Freedom in this world! From this point of view, and detached from all sentiment, Lee stands out to me like a vast fire-swept